Surely, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder remembers the 1992 Los Angeles riots, in which 53 people were killed and more than 2,000 injured. They occurred after the cops in the Rodney King beating were found innocent. (In a double jeopardy travesty of justice, they later were tried a second time by the federal government and two were found guilty.)

After George Zimmerman was found not guilty of killing Trayvon Martin, officials should be calling for calm. Already, the Los Angeles Times reported, “About 350 Los Angeles Police Department officers swarmed the Crenshaw district after groups of youths broke away from a peaceful protest in Leimert Park and stomped on cars, broke windows, set fires and attacked several people. Among those attacked were a television reporter and his cameraman, according to law enforcement authorities.”

But in addressing the national convention in Florida today of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, instead he inflamed the country. Reported the WSJ:

“Attorney General Eric Holder attacked ‘stand-your-ground laws’ three days after the acquittal of a man in last year’s shooting of an unarmed Florida teen, saying in a speech that such laws encourage more violence than they prevent….

“Mr. Holder denounced laws that permit a person to use force in self-defense without first attempting to retreat from the situation.

“‘Separate and apart from the case that has drawn the nation’s attention, it’s time to question laws that senselessly expand the concept of self-defense and sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods,’ Mr. Holder said. It was the first time the attorney general criticized such laws publicly, and by raising the issue in a speech largely about Mr. Martin’s death, he suggested a connection between the shooting and the enactment of such laws.

“Mr. Holder drew sustained applause when he declared, ‘We must stand our ground to ensure that our laws reduce violence and take a hard look at laws that contribute to more violence than they prevent.'”

He said “separate and apart from the case” because Zimmerman and his defense team didn’t use the “stand your ground” defense because they didn’t have to. Martin punched Zimmerman in the nose, then jumped on him and smashed his head into the concrete until Zimmerman shot Martin.

Yet Holder obviously was using the Martin-Zimmerman tragedy to advance the Obama-Holder agenda of attacking our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms — and to defend ourselves. They want us naked before attackers.

Yet Holder himself is surrounded by armed guards. And when he leaves office, the former corporate attorney quickly will become a multimillionaire — through book deals, speechs and sitting on corporate boards — who will be able to hire private, armed guards. And Obama, of course, will have Secret Service protection for the rest of his life.

The rest of us don’t have such a privileged and protected life. We’re on our own to defend ourselves.

I hope the L.A. situation calms down. But if another deadly riot ensues, we’ll know who incited it.

By John Seiler

Los Angeles is dealing with massive protests and possibly violence after the not guilty verdict in the murder trial of George Zimmerman. But instead of trying to calm things down, the Los Angeles Times is stirring them up with Robin Abcarian’s column, “The ugly rehabilitation of George Zimmerman has begun.” It’s the latest in a series of biased articles she’s written on the case.

Here’s the picture at the top of her new article:

That’s the picture of Martin when he was 12 years old, five years before the incident in question.

Here’s a later picture of him:

Big difference.

If you’re a guy, imagine the difference in your life between when you were 12 and when you were 17. You’re bigger, more muscular, more aggressive.

Ladies, remember the difference you saw in your brother, son or boyfriend.

If you’re still in doubt, go to your local high school and watch the boys on the football team practicing, which they are now for the fall season.

One of my Facebook friends wrote that his grandfather, at 17, was storming the beaches as a U.S. Marine at Okinawa. Col. David Hackworth, the most decorated American soldier at the time of his death in 2005, at 14 lied about his age in 1945, and fought in the U.S. Army in the last days of World War II in Northern Italy.

Even today, you can join the U.S. military at age 17, albeit with your parents’ permission.

For Abcarian, and so many others, to portray Martin as a slight, skinny 12-year-old, even after the trial is over, is outrageous and journalistic malpractice. A main reason we have football, baseball, basketball, soccer and other sports — and Jr. ROTC, Boy Scouts, and other activities — is to channel the aggression every normal late-teenage boy has. When necessary, it’s channeled into the military to defend our country.

Not guilty

What Abcarian and so many others don’t acknowledge is that the prosecution never even came close to proving its case against Zimmerman. In fact, as even such liberals as Geraldo Rivera and Alan Dershowitz have pointed out, the case always was so weak it never should have been brought to trial.

I watched most of the case, including the closing arguments, and the prosecution case always was flimsy. The whole thing was a bunch of “maybes.” Which isn’t enough to convict someone “beyond a reasonable doubt” and send him to prison where he almost certainly would have been killed by vengeful inmates.

We’ll never know exactly what happened. And it remains terrible that Martin died.

But what most likely happened is that Zimmerman followed Martin some of the way that fateful nibht. But Martin, being young and athletic, easily could have run away from the pudgy Zimmerman. (He was pudgy even before his weight gain after his arrest.) Instead, Martin closed in, hammered Zimmerman with a chop across the nose, then jumped on the older man and hammered his head into the concrete. Zimmerman, fearing he would be killed, then pulled his gun and shot Martin.

Police tape

Abcarian also pooh-poohed the doctoring of the police tape to make it look as if Zimmerman was doing a racial profile, when he wasn’t. She wrote:

“In particular, [brother Robert Zimmerman Jr.] has hammered the media for creating a ‘false narrative’ about his brother, reserving special contempt for NBC, which edited the tape of George’s call to Sanford police to make it sound as if he offered up the information that Trayvon Martin was black, when in fact, a police operator asked him to describe the young man he was following. That was a huge blunder on NBC’s part.”

Blunder? Or intentional distortion? A lawsuit by George Zimmerman against NBC might bring out the truth.

But whatever happened, I remember early on how that NBC tape totally racialized the reporting on the story, and its public perception.

Nowhere in Abcarian’s article does she write that Zimmerman is a Hispanic (or Latino). The closest she comes is noting, in parentheses, “The Zimmermans’ father is white; their mother is Peruvian.” 

In America today, the rule is that you decide yourself your own ethnicity. Thus, President Obama’s mother was white and his father was black; but he identifies himself as black. Zimmerman always has identified himself as “Hispanic.” Why doesn’t Abcarian?

Because if he’s Hispanic, then it’s hard to portray him as some kind of white supremacist. Although the Nation magazine actually has done so in an article entitled, “White Supremacy Acquits George Zimmerman.” Amazing. In the old days before the FBI infiltrated it in the 1960s, the Ku Klux Klan would have lynched Zimmerman for being both Hispanic and Catholic.

Federal case?

The FBI also has thoroughly investigated the case and found that Zimmerman was “not a racist.” That’s why I think President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, although they continue to look into the case, will not bring federal civil rights charges against Zimmerman.

With all the other scandals swirling around this administration — Snowden, Fast and Furious, IRS harassment — they have enough headaches already.

A case against Zimmerman could end up going before a Republican federal judge. But even a Democratic federal judge would be more impartial, and competent, than was Judge Nelson in the Florida trial.

Discovery would be brutal for the prosecution because everything the FBI has found out, not just about Zimmerman but about Martin, would come out.

Worse, a trial could happen in 2014, just before the mid-term elections. Republican candidates would point to Zimmerman’s acquittal by a jury, and ask why Obama-Holder were piling on.

Say what you will about Obama and his team, but winning two national elections shows how politically savvy they are. So they’re likely to wait a few months to keep happy Abcarian and the other liberals baying for Zimmerman’s blood, then drop the case on late Dec. 20, the Friday before Christmas week when nobody’s paying attention to the news, citing the FBI as an excuse.

By Steven Greenhut

SACRAMENTO — A Sacramento area family is mourning the death of their mentally disabled son, who was shot to death by a sheriff’s deputy after the family had called the sheriff’s department for help in restraining him. Newspaper accounts suggest the deputy ordered the young man — a severe germophobe — onto the ground, which sparked intense struggling. After a tussle, the deputy shot the man in front of his family.

As is typical, the sheriff defended the officer and said that he was well within his rights to use deadly force, which is no doubt true given that current law gives officers wide latitude to restrain and even kill people. Comb through newspapers across the country and one will find many incidents of officer-involved shootings and aggressive behavior by the authorities, who, as an aside, increasingly look like paramilitary rather than community officers. Police say society has become more dangerous, but crime rates are falling even during tough economic times. The number of officers killed on duty is at record lows.

In my view, the reason for the incidents is the nature of policing has changed. Following the 9/11 attacks, officers have convinced themselves that every member of the public is a potential threat. Every local police department is awash in grants from “Homeland Security” to buy the latest toys and weaponry. Attitudes have changed and the local police aren’t your friends any more.

Calling the cops

From a practical standpoint, these incidents remind us to think carefully before calling for police help. From a policy perspective, it’s time for a wide-ranging debate about use-of-force issues that’s not dominated by police unions and their political courtiers.

This is from the Los Angeles Daily News this week: “Abdul Arian, the 19-year-old Winnetka man killed in a hail of police bullets on April 11, was buried Tuesday at the Pierce Brothers Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood. … [M]any attendees who knew Arian expressed anger about the way he died, following a car chase through the San Fernando Valley that ended on the 101 Freeway … .” Arian is pictured nearby.

I’ve written about such shootings at the hands of deputies and police officers. Sometimes they are justified, but often the killings leave me wondering whether those officers would have reacted as they did had it been their child driving the car or their mentally ill son squirming on the ground.

Many people have been outraged at the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida and liberal critics have blamed those “stand your ground” laws that allow the use of deadly force by ordinary citizens when they are under attack rather than forcing them to retreat before defending themselves.

Such laws might embolden people, but I wish these critics — who insist on putting a racial tilt on a matter that has far broader implications — would also look closely at government-sanctioned use of force. If “stand your ground” laws embolden armed citizens, what happens when armed officials are given the broadest legal latitude to kill and also are protected by their departments and their unions?

Police officers sometimes have to use deadly force. We all understand that. It’s an oftentimes tough job. But we keep seeing the fruits of America’s slide down that slippery slope toward a police state: 6-year-olds searched at airports, armed police patrolling the halls of junior high schools, drones deployed over U.S. skies to crack down on crime, SWAT teams arresting the sellers of unlicensed raw milk, armed agents shutting down peaceful medical marijuana clinics, code officers and other regulatory agents granted the powers and weaponry of peace officers, trigger-happy police who seem to reach for their weapons before trying other, less-deadly alternatives.

We’ve become a society of checkpoints and searches and increased surveillance wherever we go. We have federal officials who monitor bank accounts and gain added powers to snoop on us, broad anti-terrorism laws that allow the authorities to detain citizens indefinitely without due process. Many conservatives applaud these expansions of power because of their concern about terrorist threats and street crime. Liberals applaud them also, given how eager they are to use government to “improve” our society. The more laws and regulations one passes, the more authorities one needs to enforce them.

Where’s the criticism?

Whatever happened to civil libertarians, who must be in hiding somewhere? Why aren’t Christians — who are more than willing to flex their political muscle on gay marriage and other issues — talking about the impact of these policies on the least among us, or thinking seriously about those in jails and prisons?

We’re creating a brutal and inhumane society. This is from a recent Los Angeles Times article: “A Los Angeles County commission investigating jail abuse heard tearful testimony … from clergy and civilian monitors who worked in the lockups and said they witnessed deputies assaulting inmates and bullying witnesses to keep quiet. One jail monitor broke down as she recounted being intimidated by a deputy whom she said saw beat an unconscious inmate. A weeping jail chaplain described deputies calling him a rat after he reported another beating.”

When officials misbehave so egregiously, it undermines our society and our form of government in deep and disturbing ways.

Ultimately, it is up to we, the people, to push the pendulum back in a more sensible direction. Since 9/11, Americans have placed their security over their freedom, but I’m sensing an understanding of the problem among serious people from all political perspectives.

When Americans think about public employee issues these days, they think about the pension crisis.

But as serious a problem as that is, the biggest public-employee issue relates more directly to who we are as a people and what kind of society we want to live in. We need to demand that the authorities behave more like members of our community and less like an invading army.

By Katy Grimes

By now everyone in America knows the name of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year old tragically killed on February 26 by a Florida neighborhood watch captain. While the details of the case are still suspicious at this point, and have even been altered in some reports, one fact remains: a young man is dead.

Instead of reporting on the facts as they came out, the media have become the story, and tragedy has been overshadowed by melodramatic story telling.

The media have doctored facts, ignored facts, covered up facts, altered photos and drawn incorrect conclusions to fit an agenda. It used to be that journalists were fired for knowingly distorting a story or altering facts and documents.

The death of Trayvon Martin is tragic enough without the elite mass media dog-piling all over one another, desperate for a piece of the action. In doing so, the media knowingly prevented the facts from getting in the way of sexy, morbid, delicious and damning headlines.

Politicians Join The Story

Never passing up a media opportunity to grab headlines by exploiting someone, politicians have now jumped on the bandwagon by donning hoodie sweatshirts on the floor of the U.S. Congress and in California’s state Capitol. In what was probably the biggest public relations blunder of the decade, they all looked like idiotic thugs — as does everyone else who wears a hoodie.

Let’s not forget that the purpose of wearing a hoodie is to cover the face and look like a tough guy. Is there any coincidence that nearly every bank robber, home invasion burgler and 7-11 robbery suspect wears a hoodie?

Race-Baiting Mob Mentality

Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and other black leaders have inserted themselves into the fray, fueling a mob mentality and a dangerous rush to judgment.

In one more of his typical race-baiting statements, Jackson told media Trayvon Martin’s death shows how “blacks are under attack” and “targeting, arresting, convicting blacks and ultimately killing us is big business.”

Jackson could not have made a more despicable and irresponsible statement.

“We want George Zimmerman in court with handcuffs behind his back,” Sharpton told media.

In one of the most stupid moves yet, Actor/Director Spike Lee grossly exacerbated the media frenzy by tweeting Zimmerman’s home address — only Lee tweeted the wrong address, putting a retired couple at risk for their lives in his zeal by encouraging people to protest at the home. The couple had to vacate their own home after receiving threats from the crowds congregated outside their residence. Lee has since apologized to the elderly couple, and paid a settlement for their suffering as well as expenses incurred.

MSNBC political analyst and Democratic fundraiser Karen Finney blamed Republicans for Martin’s death and said, “[Republican politicians] reinforce and validate old stereotypes that associate the poor and welfare as criminal behavior with African-Americans and people of color, calling us lazy, undeserving recipients of public assistance. In the case of Trayvon, those festering stereotypes had lethal consequences.”

Trayvon Martin’s mother, Sabrina Fulton, has said that Zimmerman killed her son “because of the color of his skin.” Fulton has, however, applied for two patents for the phrases, “Justice for Trayvon” and “I am Trayvon.” The phrases are now being sold on hoodie sweatshirts.

The New Black Panther Party has issued a bounty poster and offered a $10,000 bounty for the “capture” of George Zimmerman. But Zimmerman is not on the run, nor has he been charged with anything yet. “Child killer of Trayvon Martin — Wanted Dead or Alive,” the poster reads.

This case is sounding more and more like the Duke Lacrosse team case, also tried and convicted in the media, and by vicious, lying public officials.

In the middle of an election cycle, apparently anything goes.

The Facts We Know

On February 26, 17-year old Trayvon Martin, a black male, was walking in a gated neighborhood in which he did not reside.

Martin was on suspension for 10 days from school. In the past several months, Martin was suspended from school three times, once for the possession of drug paraphernalia.

George Zimmerman, an Hispanic adult male, Neightborhood Watch captain for the neighborhood, saw Martin in the neighborhood, felt he was suspicious and called 9-1-1.

Zimmerman was carrying a licensed, loaded gun.

The Miami Herald reported that, in the gated community Zimmerman lived and voluntarily patrolled, there were eight burglaries, nine thefts and one shooting in the past year. Neighbors said Zimmerman was a dedicated Neighborhood Watch Captain, and had even prevented and solved some neighborhood crimes.

Zimmerman identified himself as an Hispanic, and was a registered Democrat.

Martin and Zimmerman had a verbal and physical altercation.

Police arrived and found Zimmerman bleeding on his face and from the back of his head, and  had grass stains on his back.

Martin was shot by Zimmerman and died at the scene.

President Barack Obama inserted himself into the story and said at a news conference that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin.

The ‘Facts,’ As Reported By Mass Media

Here are the “facts,” as reported by the media:

A “racial conflict” in a Florida neighborhood resulted in the brutal killing of an innocent black teenager, by a white man.

Martin was a “good boy” and was on suspension only for five days for something “non-violent and minor.”

Zimmerman was identified first as a “white” male, then a “white Hispanic,” and an overzealous Neighborhood Watch captain.

Zimmerman was said to have aggressively pursued Martin, and initiated the altercation leading to the shooting.

Since the story broke, the media have been using a photo of Martin from five years ago, in which he looks like a sweet little kid.

Media outlets finally are using a current photo of 17-year old Martin, but lightened his skin and softened his features.

Don’t Let The Facts Get In The Way of A Good Story

A recently identified witness has reported seeing George Zimmerman on the ground with
Trayvon on top of him, punching him. The witness told police and the media that Zimmerman screamed and yelled for help. But the victim’s family says they also have a witness who said that Zimmerman was on top of Martin before he shot him.

The facts are still coming out, but not as fast as media reports calling for the prosecution of Zimmerman.

Former NAACP leader C.L. Bryant has accused Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton of “exploiting” the Trayvon Martin tragedy to “racially divide this country.”

Bryant said people like Jackson and Sharpton are being misleading in suggesting there is an epidemic of “white men killing black young men.”

“The epidemic is truly black on black crime,” Bryant told the Daily Caller. “The greatest danger to the lives of young black men are young black men.” Bryant said he wished civil rights leaders would focus their protests on those problems.

“Why not be angry about the wholesale murder that goes on in the streets of Newark and Chicago?” he asked. “Why isn’t somebody angry about that six-year-old girl who was killed on her steps last weekend in a cross fire when two gang members in Chicago start shooting at each other? Why is there no outrage about that?”

Bryant said he worries that “people like Sharpton and those on the left” will make Martin’s death a campaign issue in the presidential race; but it already has become a campaign issue, thanks to the media, which are now in the business of making the news.